impenetrable Danish accent. In one sense Esperanto pronunciation is standardized (each letter stands for one sound, no confusing
My final obstacle to Kimo comprehension had to do with the important sense in which he differed from all the other speakers at the congress. They were fluent, but he was rapid-fire fluent. I couldn’t keep up with him. He spoke like a native. But this was not as confounding as the fact that he spoke like a native because he was a native. I discovered this when Kimo’s son, a nine-year-old with purple hair and a skateboard tucked under his arm, wandered into the room to ask his father a question. The woman in front of me asked the man next to her, “Is his son a native speaker, too?” “Yes, second-generation,” he answered. “Wonderful, no?”
When I cornered Kimo later in the day to find out everything I could about his no-doubt totally weird and fascinating upbringing, he met my falling-over-myself excitement with a shrug. Born in Copenhagen to a Danish father and a Polish mother who met through Esperanto, he appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. Esperanto was the medium of his parents’ relationship and of the entire home life of their family. Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak Danish as a native, too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue.
For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that Polish would have been if both of his parents had been Polish.
Kimo didn’t choose to learn Esperanto, nor did his son, but everyone else at the conference did. Somewhere along the way they’d decided it worth their time to learn this Utopian pipe-dream language, and I wanted to understand why. The stated reason in pamphlets and speeches and passionate letters to the editor is too abstract: “Esperanto is a ‘linguistic handshake,’ a neutral ground where people of different nations can communicate as equals.” Nice idea, but people don’t speak languages for abstract reasons. The Irish feel a strong emotional attachment to the once-persecuted language of their heritage, but despite mandatory school instruction they don’t speak Irish. So goes the story of hundreds of attempts by political and cultural organizations to convince people to speak a language. And the fact that Esperanto is an invented language makes the notion that anyone would speak it even more unlikely. By the time Esperanto came along, a couple centuries’ worth of invented languages had failed to attract more than a handful of speakers. None of them at any point had anywhere close to fifty thousand speakers, the most conservative estimate for Esperanto (the least conservative is two million)—much less any native speakers.
“Success” is probably not the first word that comes to mind when you think of Esperanto, but in the small, passionate world of invented languages there has never been a bigger one.
Un Nuov Glot
The nineteenth century saw a complete change in both the purposes and the methods of language invention. The change in method can be clearly seen in the following examples, the first from the first half of the century and the second from the second half:
1.
2.
The second example, from Jean Pirro’s Universalglot, published in 1868, can be understood by anyone with a passing familiarity with the general shape of European languages. It can be guessed at pretty successfully even if you only know English or French. But how to guess the meaning of the first example, from Solresol, developed by Jean Francois Sudre in the 1830s? Knowing what we know about the categorization principles employed by the language inventors of the seventeenth century, you might guess that the words beginning with
It had something, however, that for a time made Sudre the toast of Paris—or at least of Brussels. It had a performable gimmick. The syllables of his language were taken from the seven notes of the musical scale—do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. His language could be sung, whistled, or played on a violin. When he invited the press to a demonstration of his Langue Musicale Universelle in 1833, they arrived to find not a lecture but a show—he played phrases on his violin while his students translated them into French. If the audience members weren’t impressed, they were at least entertained. A year later, Sudre took his show on the road.
As his performances grew more elaborate, his fame grew. He would take phrases from the audience to translate into Solresol; he would perform translations not just with French but with multiple languages; he might even do a little singing. Since his language was fundamentally a method of translating phrases using seven units, there was no reason why he had to be limited to the seven units of the musical scale. He could translate using seven hand signals, seven knocks, the seven colors of the rainbow. In an especially impressive demonstration, he would blindfold himself and request that an audience member give one of his students a phrase to translate. The student would then silently approach Sudre, take his hand, and transmit the message by touch alone, using seven distinct locations on Sudre’s fingers.
Sudre’s performances earned him popular attention and praise. He filled large concert halls. He met the king and queen of England. Everyone knew his name.
However, hardly anyone knew his language. People liked the idea, but not enough to learn the system or, crucially, to fund his work. Solresol was generally regarded, to Sudre’s great frustration, as an ingenious parlor trick.
As Sudre toured and struggled to make his mark, the world was changing in such a way that made the need for a universal language seem more pressing than ever. While the elites of previous eras had always had the opportunity to engage in international contact, industrialization was now bringing this opportunity to regular folks. The steamship, the locomotive, and the telegraph narrowed distances and expanded the range of communication situations a person might find himself in. Language barriers became that much more noticeable.
And schemes to overcome those barriers started to proliferate. But these schemes looked nothing like the old ones.
So why hadn’t anyone thought to do it that way before?
The idea to create a language out of existing languages wasn’t completely new. An Arabic-Persian-Turkish mix called Balaibalan was designed sometime between 1400 and 1700 (the documents can’t be reliably dated),
